by Anna Barkhudarova

Created on: August 16, 2008   Last Updated: August 21, 2008

Internet is the tool where people can find information on any topic they research twenty four-seven with surprising easiness. If you are one of those people who like performing search on others than you will agree how handy the Internet becomes on looking up your new date for instance.
In one of those nights when the woman's curiosity or the journalism beginner's roots brought me to my laptop I typed a name of a man in the Yahoo search bar. To his big luck and my even bigger disappointment I did not find anything that would give me an insight into his life or at least his interests so that I could strike him with the brilliance and people's skills next time we meet. However my thirst for information needed to be fed and I typed my own name. To my surprise, I found dozens of entries, if not more, that had mentioning of my name. I wondered could it be possible that I am so popular with the search engine. I started reading. In three minutes I found out about myself more than I would ever tell anyone in first three months of acquaintance. My profiles were everywhere: starting from the social utility web sites such as Facebook, and I have to admit I try my hardest not to log on to it anymore, to my extracurricular activities in the university. I kept on reading. My name kept showing up on Flickr, a photo-sharing site, I admit I made it public; the site for posting articles Helium, charity donations web site, industry connecting site Linkedin, Skype, and even Workopolis where one can easily find the employment history.

Everything I have been writing about and interested in for the past six years was laid out in front of the millions of people in the open space. It looked like the only place that had no information on me was an Internet based encyclopedia Wikipedia, I guess I am not that popular after all! Of course, when I was registering for all these web sites unconsciously I realized that some of my private and not-so-private information will be available to any interesting parties but to be a witness to the power of Internet search myself had much stronger effect.
Out of this little experiment I made few conclusions. One is that if my date ever wants to search me he will have much more advantage. Two is that I really do not need that several hundred paper filled Yellow Pages book if I need to find someone and I can save few trees by going online.
Lastly, the necessity to delete few profiles from some of those sites to protect my identity became apparent. We all like trying out new things and gladly register for the social networking sites such as Facebook to see how classmates are doing and where they are up to now, or we see the need in making new business contacts for one of the projects that require other's expertise. But may be it is important to go back in few years to those sites and delete information or profiles when those sites fulfilled their purposes so that each of us retains some control over revealing the identity and private information about our lives or simply to make us somewhat mysterious and leave some food for thought for the next date.

Learn more about this author, Anna Barkhudarova.
Click here to send this author comments or questions.